Artistic Practice – Page 2 – A Handbook for Emerging Artists

How can I minimize or prevent losing momentum upon reaching a goal?

Working towards a goal builds up momentum: the closer you get, the more worthwhile your efforts can feel. This momentum can get scattered by reaching a finishing line; instead of stabilizing your work rhythm and thus your artistic identity further (knowledge of progress, of having manifested something), it can lead to parts of your identity crumbling, to be replaced by a vacuum: who are you? Why are you?

The deeper your identification with goals and challenges, the harder their absence can hit you: having had an exhibition opening, having finished a difficult piece, having published a catalog of your work – accomplishments can generate a lack of structure, direction and purpose. A limbo. You accumulated knowledge, skill and will, but then seem to have lost the platform to invest it in.

Processes and goals

Since goals are usually singular, temporary events, it makes sense to rather focus on what accompanies you more permanently: the processes that lead to them. Habitualizing these turn them into your life’s permanent backbone: being in the studio on time, preparing the next work, putting in a certain number of hours every day. Goals can be harnessed for increased productivity and motivation, at the risk of experiencing a motivational low upon their attainment. By analyzing your personal experiences with processes and goals, you can establish a balance that benefits from using both.

Forming habits

The long-term solution here is to establish habits, which can start today: habits are formed by repeating your actions consistently, based on specific triggers: once you finished your cup of tea, you put it in the sink. Once you get out of bed, you make the bed. This works for every part of your life, including your artistic practice: once you brushed your teeth, you get dressed; once you got dressed, you leave for the studio; once you entered the studio, you turn off your phone’s notifications and put it aside; once you disabled your phone, you sit down to work for an hour. The banality of these actions, combined by stacking them together (“habit stacking”), results in a powerful approach to life (and work): since you get used to these sequences, you question them less. Since you question them less, you can focus on your work more efficiently.

Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Carceri series, 18th century

Apart from your habits, there are a few further strategies to consider:

Establish reliable habits: To consistently come up with new ideas is your perpetual reality as an artist: let it become your routine. Instead of defining yourself through your achievements and goals, consider establishing processes that will become habitual – reducing the impact of reaching your goals. Since quality is the consequence of quantity (of the amount of time you invest), this approach can result in your work’s quality to increase as well.
Work on multiple pieces/projects in parallel: Experiment with working on parallel sets of production processes – with the intention of them not being finished at the same time (if they would, this might exacerbate the whole problem of losing momentum). Note that finishing a piece/project might require you to temporarily focus it exclusively. Experiment with the various ways of working in parallel to find out which work for you (staying within one medium; touching various media but sticking to an overarching topic; working on multiple independent projects or with different collaborators, etc).
Prepone preproduction: Instead of focussing on projects consecutively, experiment with preponing the preproduction phase of upcoming projects right into your current phase – even if those later projects are utopian and unconfirmed. This lets you think about them without actual pressure, which can be both enriching and empowering; once you do focus on them, you are already somewhat familiar with their parameters. This can result in a more soothing gradient into new domains, which can come in handy once the current project is done.
Generate a list of potential futures: Establish and maintain a list of potential research areas and future projects. Let this list include both full-blown projects (a work series, a collaboration, a body of work for an exhibition) as well as smaller fragments of investigation (researching specific tools, writing about your work, deepening your understanding about a previously untouched work aesthetic). Let this be your timeline of potential futures: you won’t ever be able to dive into all of them, but having them available in a rough overview will help you see the many areas of potential investigation. This will return agency to you, enabling you to look at these list of utopias, and engage with them.

Setting up process-based work habits will influence your attitude toward goals, and lets you use the best of “both worlds”: the streamlined reliability of habits as your structural backbone, mixed with the short motivational overdrive and bursts of peak performance offered by goals. Used adequately and sensitively, this can minimize your loss of momentum upon reaching goals.

I feel disassociated from my work. What can I do after having lost motivation or momentum?

There are endless reasons for artists to feel disassociated from their work: accomplishing something can lead to post-achievement depression; both success and failure can feed emotional isolation and doubts. If you lost motivation or momentum, your situation isn’t too different from that of someone who just starts out – both situations are based on doubts, featuring various ambiguities on how to get going. It can be worthwhile to revisit the chapters on how to start, focus, investigate and increase the pressure; in addition, consider the following strategies:

Create a list of previous artistic choices: While a finished piece can feel like an answer to its viewers, it also always represents an open set of questions to its creator. Every finished artwork carries these questions within itself; strands to pursue further, manifestations that may want additional, potentially better solutions. Go through your previous artworks and list the formal and semantic attributes used to create them: format, palette, movement, duration, speed; thoughts, influences, references, etc. Understand what happened in the works, and examine what touches you. Some choices might feel to be dead ends, while others might make you giddy. Having a list with your formal and semantic choices lets you remember your passion, and see where you could delve into next. A list of your previous artistic choices is a personal map of paths to pursue.
Be social: Meet friends to discuss your situation. This gives you a voice, and enables them to offer insights and empathy, which could strengthen you to move on. Alternatively, take time off: consider vacation (even a day without the internet and your smartphone can be blissful), consider going to the movies or a library etc. While working might have required a certain focus through isolation, now can be the time to rekindle family and friendships, and to understand how to better balance life and work in the future.
Be withdrawn: Experiment with introspection: meditation, visiting museums or the gym, listening to podcasts, reading: it can pay off to not surround yourself with other people’s energies, but to rather stay focused on yourself. This lets you dive into your situation, your art practice, or your medium’s history – which often serves as a reminder of the many paths untaken in our own artistic practice. Analyzing art that inspires you (including your own work!) can remind you of why you started making art in the first place.
Engage in side tasks: Even if you’re down, it might be possible to engage with low-commitment tasks: skimming through an older publication of your work, going through your archive. What about cleaning your studio, uncluttering your flat, making proper photos of your work or sorting your archive. These activities can enable your mind to wander, with the added benefit of getting work done. They can help you remember what you’ve accomplished so far, and create space to breathe and focus. Being exposed to sketches from several years ago (or even sorting your invoices while doing taxes) might help you remember previous efforts, and thus highlight future domains of investigation.
In case of a reached goal: post-process it: Depending on the goal you reached, now might be a good time to post-process what you did; this can include writing a diary entry, sending out a newsletter, updating your CV/website or social media, or letting gatekeepers/your network know about it.

I finished something and feel down. Shouldn’t I be happy and satisfied?

Working towards goals can lead to structure and focus, and enable peak performances: processes, collaborations and time schedules sometimes all work in unison towards accomplishing your targets. Streamlined work phases can be deeply and holistically satisfying: you know what to do, how to do it, and why you’re doing it. Even if your specific experience of working towards a goal is less positive, actually reaching a finishing line can easily influence your work structures negatively. Instead of experiencing bliss, you might experience hardships: your expectations might not be met (your hopes and ideas about what would happen upon reaching the goal), your structures might crumble (rented studios or tools need to be returned, collaborations with specific people end), and, if unlucky, a burnout might emerge as a result of the overtime you invested. While the idea of reaching goals is positive, its reality is often more ambiguous.

The value of your artistic practice

Understand that your previous satisfaction most likely came from pursuing your artistic practice while also having a goal towards which to work: you had a platform – one that required and rewarded your focus. Losing this platform is bound to result in frustration. While reaching your goal might have resulted in temporary happiness, the loss of momentum is often way more noticeable – which is why you need to get back to work and reestablish yourself: by reestablishing your artistic platform. For this, you don’t necessarily need a new project or goal: their lack doesn’t diminish the validity and importance of your artmaking practice. What’s relevant is for you to grasp the importance of your artistic practice as basis of your identity: you are an artist because you pursue an artistic practice. As long as you do this, you have a voice – which can ultimately lead to further visibility, projects and goals. Over an artist’s life, it seems most important to gradually minimize this loss of self. To this end, strong work habits seem the best strategy.

One step at a time..

For now though, if you feel unmotivated or depressed: take your time. Accept the challenge of your situation: to eventually get back to work. Focus on establishing a daily work habit in the spirit of beginner’s mind, and of reestablishing yourself as an artist (to yourself): you might have achieved a lot just days ago, and might have solved an insurmountable challenge. Yet with this challenge gone, you need to take care of the new one: to continue working. Instead of worrying about goals, focus on being the person who does specific actions: who’s in the studio on time, creates a clean studio, draws for fifteen minutes. Who stops before it gets to be too much.

Don’t expect yourself to work a full day; it’s OK to attend to (re-)forming the habit of simply getting to the studio at all. Considering the circumstances, achieving this isn’t nothing; it’s a lot. If you manage to get to the studio every day, you’ll eventually want to do more there. Small tasks is all it needs to get there: progress through tiny steps – without risking further self-alienation. Consider ritualizing the beginning: get dressed. Brush your teeth. Take your shoes on. Focus on the small, innocent steps without which no studio day can start. Once there, start cleaning. Read a book. Ignore your phone. Revisit unfinished work. Write down your thoughts, then leave for a walk: you’ve done enough. You managed to get dressed. You managed to get to the studio. It’s through the repetition of gradual, basic steps like this that you reestablish yourself.

Being without direction is part of the cycle

Your artistic practice is both opportunity and struggle. Whatever you create is what you get judged by – if not by others, then by yourself. Reaching a goal manifests your many inabilities, while removing your motivating force. To transcend this, strongly consider replacing a goal-based with a process-based approach. Once you understand life (and your artmaking) as a process, it’s easier to be OK with being stalled, to be without direction: it’s part of the endless artistic cycle. At the same time, don’t rush: you will develop subconscious inclinations on what to pursue next, similar to an athlete whose body aches to finally get back to training after a week’s vacation. To get back to a collector who was interested in your work, to call your gallery and meet for coffee, to visit friends or colleagues – or to do none of these, but simply stay home, watch a movie and sulk. It’s ok: this too shall pass.

Consider reading these strategies on how to continue your practice when feeling disassociated from it, and the various chapters on how to start (focusing, investigating, and increasing your commitment) your artmaking.

How do I find or establish quality in my work?

As an artist, your highest goal is to understand your own ideas of quality, to grow with and expand them. Your standards will keep changing, just as you do, and sometimes conflict with each other: some works will need to scream, while others will need to be silent. Some works will need to do both. Think of your quality criteria as a rhizome, something of depth and complexity, and endless connection points: like a symphony, or a plant with indefinite subterranean roots. Something that can incorporate varying ideas of strength and power without opposition or conflict: to be slow yet strong, dedicated yet open. Over time, you’ll understand overarching standards that encompass, include, and potentially replace your prior ones: where smoothness of movement might have been relevant initially, your focus might shift to full choreographies – and later return to the initial focus. Quality standards are ever-shifting, just as you are. They will morph along your moods and life phases, carrying the potential for endless surprises.

XIV piano piece for David Tudor 4, by Sylvano Bussoti (1980); from “A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia”

How to Find Quality in Your Work

You establish your quality ideals by mindfully immersing yourself into art, and life. They are a consequence of all your aesthetic and semantic preferences, including all your affinities and actual capabilities. The more sensitive you are about understanding what matters to you (media, processes, tools, aesthetics and content), the more likely you’ll establish ideals that suit you. You’re never bound by current limitations though: your today’s capabilities can change tremendously, based on your willingness to invest time and effort.

Whenever you create something, you also form a value judgement: about what worked, and what didn’t. About what moved you, or moved you too much, or didn’t move you enough. About what was too bright, too large or too slow. About the little things that might require change to result in something to feel perfect: sounds, movements, traction; density and weight; haptics and fluidity, etc. The same is true when experiencing the world: what food, hobbies, politics or social agendas you care about. Quite obviously, your affinities are deeply personal – yet your choices can sidestep them: you might like something, but decide against it; your bias might exist on a general level, but not specifically when discussing the current artwork.

Art History

While your quality criteria are yours to establish, art has a tremendous history of choices. The more you know about them, the better you will be able to connect to someone else’s choices, and continue or transcend what’s been established before you. Doing so changes your art practice from the pursuit of pure personal expression, to the proactive advance of a medium’s history. While artworks always focus on something, this adds another focus point: art history. As such, it defines your way of interacting with art per se, putting it on the same level as worldly topics. Understand that your focus on art history can lead to art that unbalancedly cares about the past – any of your choices can have the (subconscious) intention to find a secure hiding spot, a place to rest. These rarely exist in the arts, which benefit from courageous approaches. The challenge is to find a way to incorporate your self-expression in a way that reflects the past, and potentially helps to bring it into the future. For this, your references don’t have to be obvious or explicit – they don’t even have to be understood. By existing in your mind, and during the creation process, the artwork usually creates a spin that sticks, an aura that’s hard to describe but there to be felt.

Hiking without a Compass

Consider hiking in unknown territories, without a compass to guide you. You might never reach your goal: every direction is equally feasible. You might want to rest and wait for help, but the endless horizons in each direction don’t promise anyone’s arrival anytime soon. Yet you could reach your goal by simply deciding on a direction, and by starting to walk. You might want to change directions after a while, potentially subverting your previous choices. You might notice life around your path as exciting yet worrying, and keep moving. While you’ve walked for a longer time already, you notice that there might never be a goal. You get frustrated, worried, fearful – until you realize that walking actually is the goal.

This is both worrying and liberating: instead of an external goal to get to, you understand to be embedded within one already. You don’t trust this insight too much though, and keep moving. Over the years, you realize that you can walk in all sorts of ways: slowly, gracefully, weirdly; you can crawl or walk backwards, you can even dance or whistle along the way. On really good days, you move according to your inner self, without any thoughts on how it might look like, or how incredibly stupid the whole act of walking might be. Your increasing awareness of the endless ways of moving let you understand that this pursuit of moving, of the various modes of walking, is what ultimately defines you.

The pursuit of a goal resulted in you walking, and turned to you thinking of maybe, just maybe, yourself as being the goal. Once you truly understand this, you set up camp. The sun sets. You build a home, and decorate it with experiences and schemes. You still go for hikes, but look forward to returning to your camp. You don’t explore the world as much as you used to. You found a home, by walking the earth.

Vitruvian Man, by Leonardo da Vinci, ca 1490

Understand that the artistic process consists of the pursuit of .. itself. It’s a deeply self-reflecting, self-referential system, based on your own sensitivities and creations. This system is then used to process the parts of life that you care about. While you can attach yourself to the beliefs and ideals of others, this will remove your voice from the world – maybe even before it was ever formed. By fostering an atmosphere of benevolence towards experimentation, you can raise your own awareness and sensitivities: about what you want, and who you might be. Without these, you can imitate others, but won’t be able to develop your voice, your ideas, your interpretation of the world. You’d be silenced, and stripped of your power.

Read the previous chapter to understand what quality is, and why it is relevant for artists.

I want to understand “quality”. What is it, and why is it relevant to artists?

One’s personal understanding of quality is required for artists to establish their own work practice. Without it, they cannot understand whether a work is “good” to them, right now – and why it would be finished.

The one thing that unites all artists is their pursuit of establishing and implementing a personal work practice. For this, they need to understand their own quality criteria. Yet what does quality mean, and how does it relate to one’s work?

Quality in Everyday Life

When people discuss the quality of an everyday object, they usually think about the level of craft, as well as the care and attention that went into its creation. They also consider how well it fulfills its purpose: the durability of a battery, the sharpness of a knife’s blade, the stability of a chair. Objects rarely exist in, or emerge from a vacuum; most of them are the continuation of generational developments: consider the wheel, whose origins go back to before the Bronze Age. Quite obviously, humans had a lot of time to establish rather specific understandings of what makes a good wheel, and what doesn’t; that’s quality in everyday life: the sum total of valid expectations towards something whose purpose is clear

Quality in the Arts

Art seems to have always accompanied humans – it might even have preceded our species’ consciousness. Seen this way, it makes sense to think of quality in art as equally (highly) evolved as that of everyday objects. For sure, every art historian will be able to judge how well a piece of art fits the quality criteria established over the last couple dozen millennia!

As we know, this isn’t true anymore. While guilds and art academies originally defined, taught and pursued strict ideas about artistic content and form, contemporary art is defined by a near-total openness in regards to what can be done, and how it can be done. This is a consequence of the changed roles and functions that artists have – from anonymous cave painters to anonymous producers of craft objects (in a world before mass production, everything was a craft object), to ordinary people using technologies to depict the world. The age-old artistic function of documenting the world visually has turned optional. As a result, contemporary artists can’t rely on any of the predefined quality ideals that were developed over centuries. Instead, they can (or rather: they have to) adapt and extend the vastness of previous canons and approaches – or they can ignore them. Doing the latter feels shallow: who would want to work in a field whose history they aren’t curious about? Ultimately though, ignoring the past could be another valid way of being an artist.

Ambiguity and the People

This historic change of the role of art also has implications for the viewers of contemporary art: they might not be able to understand what they’re seeing and experiencing, why it could matter, and how to judge it. Differently to everyday objects, the purpose of an artwork might not be clear to them. Maybe the artwork means to criticize something. Maybe it wants to disturb. Maybe it wants nothing of them at all, yet their viewing expectations demand an aesthetically pleasing dialog that they aren’t getting – so their experience becomes frustrating. If viewers apply their preexisting value judgments, chances are they won’t “get” the artwork: the wide variety of contemporary artistic modes can make it unrealistic for a viewer’s expectations to meet an artist’s ideals. They might be entirely oblivious of the reference system that might give context to what’s in front of them. Outreach programs or basic dialogs can offer missing direction and explanations, but not everyone wants to listen to explanations. Some people expect an artwork to speak for itself, yet are unable to see the complexities that it might contain. In addition, some art simply wants to remain obscure. Another frequent issue is the one of craft expectations: what’s made with obvious care and attention to detail, is often understood to matter more, and to be “better art”. At the same time, some people care about art especially for its power to subvert expectations; these people tend to then be bored by art that repeats what’s already been established – they might thus miss the nuances of change in the art of those people who silently expand the canon.

Quality and the Market

Since an artwork’s qualities can be fleeting and misunderstood, it’s often not used as main metric for judgements. Many artists are acutely aware of a unique role reversal: instead of judging an artwork’s quality to derive its monetary value, some people rather want to know about an artwork’s price, in order to then derive its potential quality: in capitalism, the price of something strongly defines our expectations for it – this holds true for art as well, which can be frustrating: if the artist’s visibility is low, it will usually result in their work’s prices to be low just as well. It can take a lot of effort to experience a low-priced work of art, and see its actual qualities – especially if these qualities don’t meet our expectations about what art should be like.

Someone’s price level, awards, residencies or the number of solo shows are external metrics, and can strongly define the perception of an artist’s value: works are good because their price is high, or because they got awards, or because their creator received awards. Refine a sense of distrust when hearing about a work’s “quality”, especially when used by people in positions of power: professors, jurors, curators, art critics, collectors, fellow artists, gallerists, etc. Apply this distrust even when people discuss your work in positive ways: they might use the idea of quality to hide their actual intent.

Personal Choices

Contemporary artists have a lot of rather personal choices to make. They need to decide which media, processes, tools, aesthetics and content to use, and how to use them.

For each of these, they have to develop personal quality criteria. These can change over time – artists don’t need to stick to previous ones. To the contrary, the pursuit of quality ideals is so heavily ingrained in contemporary thinking of arts, that artists who “simply” follow one and the same recipe for years, are frequently frowned upon: certain people dislike or question the idea of formula-based art processes, although art historically, the application of such processes might be what defined Western art the strongest. Nevertheless, artists need high degrees of curiosity about their interests, and a willingness to express these interests through endless approximations, and often frustrating mistakes: no one can tell them what to do (how their personal choices might look like), yet people will only ever be interested in the consequences of exactly these choices: this is an unusual situation in today’s world.

One’s quality criteria include certain expected decisions of contemporary art: what to do, and how to go about it. They also include process-related decisions that can come unexpected to laypeople, and sometimes aren’t understood as important to the end result: which brushes to use, how to hold, use and clean them; how to mix colors; what palette and which canvas to use, and how to stretch and prime it; whether to work on an easel or the wall, or to paint on a table. While certain art schools offer specific and strict advice on how to pursue one’s artistic practice, their graduates ultimately have to decide on their own how to blend these guidelines into a contemporary art practice: their own artistic practice. If they simply stick to what they were taught, it will likely result in anachronistic works that recreate the spirit of a time that’s essentially past. In open-quality systems like art, you can’t rely on other people’s quality judgements – the likelihood of them pursuing exactly your goals is extremely low. They might be unable to comprehend your ideas, resulting in misguided feedback or advice. That’s why you need to develop and discover your own standards and ideas of excellence: your quality criteria. It can therefore be beneficial to find art schools that discuss meta-levels of art, instead of only giving explicit craft directions: how to think about art, how to pursue one’s curiosities, how to manifest and process. An ideal art school would combine meta with craft specifics.

Read the next chapter to understand how to find or establish quality in your art.

How do I increase the commitment (and thus pressure)?

Beginnings require commitment, which often feels like the first obstacle to get going. This is a conundrum: one is required to start, in order to.. start. So what can be done to make beginnings easier? Consider experimenting with the following strategies, to see which work best for you:

Minimize stressors: Understand what causes you stress: fears (of failure, of facing your inabilities, of feeling incompetent), the wrong working environment or materials (a moldy or dusty storage space, lack of heating, a studio that’s too noisy; cheap colors that fade), etc. There’s a range of conditions you might need to be met, in order to begin anything. These conditions might be unclear to you, so it pays off to investigate them: if you feel uncomfortable because people are watching you; if you are supposed to work silently, yet inherently need to use noisy tools; if your environment has to stay clean, yet your process creates a mess; if you need more time than you have available, etc. Minimizing stressors can precede commitment, and represent the groundwork to getting going.
Note that humans aren’t terribly good in understanding their actual needs; removing all stressors can lead to a state of boredom and rot that ultimately only benefits creative decay. We all know established artists with the nicest studios and work visibility, who don’t really have a strong game going anymore; analyzing stressors can never be straight-forward, but will benefit from a deep psychological self-awareness.
Previsualize: Previsualization lets you think about the intended work, with the intention of finding upcoming challenges; it’s a form of anticipation. This turns stressful obstacles (encountered during production) into expectations: you previsualize because you want to find obstacles. You can use all sorts of methods to previsualize: 3d software, pencil sketches, a mind map or bullet list, etc; the closer the previsualization medium relates to the final medium, the more exact your predictions will usually be. Understand that you can’t anticipate all challenges emerging from a creative endeavor; you don’t have to: the idea here is to ease your way into a work, not to solve it beforehand.
Gradually increase the authority of your tools/materials/environment/collaborators: Everything can have authority over us – not necessarily because of its own volition, but also because of our own, internalized attributions: a successful artist working next door; expensive paper we got as a present; the urge to record on cassette tape (instead of doing it digitally): the more authority we ascribe to a thing (or person), the more pressure we might feel. This can stall our experiments and progress.
To improve this, use tools, materials, environment and collaborators that have as little authority over you as possible. Increase your awareness of your authority ascriptions, and find alternatives that let you experiment more freely: use free or cheap doodle material to sketch your idea (use your living room to sketch a performance, instead of a proper stage; use cheap paper instead of a canvas; loan out a camera instead of buying one). Go sit on a park bench or at a café, if your studio and its many options drag you down. Collaborate with non-judgemental people.
Once you feel comfortable enough with what you want to do, mindfully (re)introduce the things to which you attribute higher authority. Use this heightened state to test your idea further, and repeat this process until you’re sure to know exactly what you want to accomplish. Once you use the final, most authoritative items, there will be way fewer choices to make, and thus less chances to mess up your work.
Learn to take initiative: Learn to anticipate that beginnings can cause stress. Once you get past the initial stress threshold and are embedded within the actually activity (editing, performing, writing, etc), your mind, in focused pursuit of an activity, often calms down: you are in the zone. There’s a flow. This can already be experienced upon reading a book: opening it might take considerable self-persuasion – yet once you’re immersed in it, time flies. Your attention is captured. This is true even though you might be aware of this dynamic; the more often you transcend your inhibition to begin something, the more likely you’ll experience the rewards of being in the zone. This knowledge can help you anticipate and circumvent compensatory actions meant to generate short-term satisfaction: eating sweets, checking mails, diving into social media. Pursuing a more worthwhile activity serves your long-term satisfaction – if only you’d begin to take initiative.
Understand resting periods: Understand that for those activities whose beginnings cause stress, their impact can be cushioned by scheduling rest periods. This creates focused work phases intended to progress: beginnings can be easier if they only demand thirty minutes of attention. Stay attentive to your ability to concentrate, and schedule your rest periods accordingly; if you notice getting tired, it makes sense to rest: your frustrations might otherwise rise exponentially.

How do I investigate my work?

Consider experimenting with the following investigation strategies, to see which work best for you:

Goal-less exploration: When there’s no obvious urge to steer in any direction, experiment with goal-less exploration: like a musician zoning into practicing their scales, gradually morphing into playing a tune that’s based on the practicing scale. Like someone learning to typewrite, yet subconsciously forming and typing their own words, sentences and paragraphs. Like someone experimenting with sound while editing their video, discovering a new way to visualize their work. Goal-less exploration can start with your movement on the street, clay or plasticine, paper and pencil, paper to fold, or a smartphone’s video camera: any tool that doesn’t require an actual financial commitment can offer this: where large works easily demand attention and respect to both beginners and professionals (already just for the money required for the physical materials and tools), starting out can be eased by using tools, media and processes that don’t cost a lot, or might even be free.

Goal-less exploration starts with free, low-commitment tools: sheets of paper from the family (or office) printer, as well as a pencil that’s lying around. This lets you explore without fear of failure, because the material doesn’t demand respect. If this doodling (with clay, on paper, on camera) leads to an idea, itch or urge: pursue it. Repeat the idea and flesh it out, making it more specific, more according to the vision that gradually forms in your mind.
Repeat previous successes: You might have specific compositions, specific ways to operate your tools, specific materials or paths to use that led to creations you’re happy with: if in doubt, see whether you can repeat them. This will show you whether this path holds the potential for a deeper inquiry (resulting in a work series, or simply a better knowledge of the craft required to pursue your work). Understanding and repeating previous work might give you the courage for further explorations.
Create work series: Creating a series of works lets you increase your understanding and sensitivities, simply because you get to dig deeper into the process, tools, contents and aesthetics required for its creation. Once a topic or aesthetic, a sentiment feels relevant to you, why not invest the time to deepen your understanding of it: your work’s quality will usually benefit from it. In addition, this will help you establish a body of work, which often increases your artistic credibility (since you’re seen as someone willing to pursue and balance specific ideas). It also results in higher availability of works, which can be advantageous in case of collector interest in a sold piece (since having a series will let them see further works of the same kind).
Investigate your topics: Investigate the potential topics of the works you gravitate towards: if for example you enjoy a specific figurative drawing you made, try to find out what you specifically like about it – whether it’s the figure’s posture, the facial portraiture, whether it’s about color, composition – or the emotional bond you felt when creating the work. By increasing your understanding of the potential topic you’re navigating, you gradually create a multidimensional, evergrowing reference system to expand and dive into: your artistic home. This helps you to explore that home in a somewhat structured way: which artists have created similar works, over the centuries? Who ever used similar styles or tools or materials? Investigating your work is a core practice of being an artist: if you aren’t curious about your work, who ever will be?
Verbalize your ideas: Take time to write down ideas – in prose, keywords, bullet lists etc. Create tree hierarchies or mind maps to connect your ideas to generalized topics, and see what insights you can retrieve. This is an exciting way to learn about your work, already because it’s a low-commitment way of translating your ideas: not yet into physical manifestations, but into words that usually can easily keep the vision – whereas actual works always also represent the sum of our inabilities. Verbalizing your work in this fragmented way can also help you to communicate about it elsewhere (in studio visits, to collectors or curators, etc). It can become a stepping stone to writing an actual text about your work, which is usually more demanding.

How do I focus?

You focus by using focusing strategies that work for you (keep experimenting!), and by establishing realistic attitudes about art and creativity.

We need focus to dive deeper into what we do. It’s unlikely to experience our own greatness without intention, attention – and focus. This takes time. Experiment with focusing strategies, and establish realistic attitudes about art and creativity. Processes don’t just work out of the box, but might need adaption for your situation. Success benefits from appreciating the small steps.

Active focus phases: Experiment with active focus phases, meant to make you radically present for a limited time: disable all notifications on your digital devices (buzz, sound or visual cues from your smartphone, tablet, laptop, etc.). If there’s a landline (lol), detach it. Commit to doing this in increasing time spans – you can start with fifteen minutes, and then double it to thirty once you feel ready for it; or you simply use it for the amount of time that feels right, without measuring. You will ultimately find your own path and rhythm.
(Understand that apart from focus, your artistic practice can also benefit from inattention and subconscious actions: being tired, exhausted or inattentive can still bring your work forward. It might temporarily create uncomfortable results, which can have more power and potential than the decisions made intentionally.)
Form habits: Focusing on work promotes the rewarding possibilities of flow states and progress, but requires much more dedication than procrastinating or staying inattentive; doing anything is more challenging than doing nothing – activity requires more than passivity. Once you want to get something done, your mind will usually offer tempting alternatives: being on social media, replying to messages, etc. These actions offer quicker rewards to the brain than the slow-roasting complexities of most work tasks, which make them tough competitors for your attention.

Establishing habits that define when and how you work can lessen the hurdles of actually pursuing your work. The less you have to think about the setup of work, the more likely you will “simply slide” into doing that work. Identifying and disabling distractions (leaving your phone outside of the work area; setting it to “do not disturb”, using white noise via headphones, or noise cancelling technology, etc.), establishing specific work routines (when to be in the studio, when to take breaks, when to do phone calls or replying to mails), using habit stacking (“after I prepared coffee, I sit down to read my emails”; “after I mix colors, I sit down to clean my brushes”; “after I got up, I take ten minutes to write my morning pages”, etc.) are powerful strategies to enable your mind to get into working mode – and to stay there. Consider reading more about habits, it is very powerful knowledge.

Identify your needs for a conscious lifestyle: Your mind needs clarity to focus on your work. While artistic processes can benefit from subconscious decision-making (e.g. by being tired, exhausted or intoxicated), there is power in consciousness: to have the mental capacity to understand what you do. The less distracted your life setup is, the more focus you will have for your work and its challenges. Removing alcohol and drugs, identifying toxic relationships, limiting partying, establishing good sleep and fitness routines – these will enable a more quiet life, at the cost of missing out on drama that can fuel your work and passion.

The challenge is to find a path through your life that isn’t ideological (“Drinking is obviously wrong!”, “I need to be in bed every day at 10pm, so I need to leave your party now”, etc.), but self-aware and dynamic. You want to party and meet friends, you want to experiment outside the ordinary – it will make life worthwhile. But you want to end the toxicity in your life, because it does the opposite. Consider coaching, psychotherapy and deep introspection to understand and establish somewhat “ideal” surroundings for the life that you want to live.

From itch to urge: Sometimes you feel an inclination: a word, a feeling, a tendency towards a process, material or medium. Let this itch become an urge: doodle around with the prior, to create space for the latter. What starts out as curiosity about a certain aesthetic or semantic, can lead to the absolute self-demand for a deeper inspection and inquiry about that curiosity’s potential. Don’t ignore your itches. Listen to your inclinations, and implement them. See where they lead you.
Demystify inspiration: Inspiration is one of the buzzwords of creativity, often thought about as appearing out of nowhere, especially to the lucky and talented few – with the implication that the rest of us simply aren’t that lucky. This is not true: inspiration can strike you randomly (on the bus or when watching TV), but can also be fostered by active introspection. You can create inspiration: Sit and think about what work to do next by going through its various aspects: what material and content will you use? How might these influence the work’s interpretation? How do you feel about this interpretation? Do you want to wiggle it a bit further? What describing attributes come to your mind – do these support your vision? How can you strengthen or weaken certain interpretations? What other works might make sense to get created alongside? How would you envision an exhibition featuring these works? Take a pencil and paper, or whatever other low-commitment tools work best for you, and brain-storm away.
Find inspiration: Even if you feel to be entirely without ideas of your own, you can proactively create space to finding inspiration – by exposing yourself to the world: become an active experiencer of life. Visit exhibitions (museums usually charge you, galleries won’t) and libraries, read books or magazines, watch documentaries, participate in discussions: inspiration is everywhere, as long as you actively want to find it. What were the last events that really excited you? Was it a sports game, your cat or dog, the way someone treated someone else; someone’s voice, a movie or TV series, a tune or perfume? Increase the awareness of your passions, to understand whether you want to investigate them further for your art practice. Become attentive to life and to your interests, and inspiration can be found in unexpected places.
Imitate others: Imitate other people’s work to learn more about yourself, by using appropriation as learning strategy. Understand whether it’s a certain topic or aesthetic that excites you, and see what happens upon making it yours. The idea is not to create a direct copy, but to appropriate the original into your artistic universe; to see it through your lens, and let that lens define the result. To imitate with the goal of creating something new and personal. This way you don’t need to worry about plagiarism: if your focus is to find and establish your own voice, you won’t become a copycat. If you pursue your own path deeply and authentically, you will only ever appropriate specific fragments, ultimately establishing your own themes and forms – simply because your interests are unlikely to totally coincide with the work you reference. This way, imitation can help you find your own voice – with the works that might have excited and triggered you years ago, often no longer being quite so exciting to you today.
Understand your apprenticeship status: Entering a new field confronts you with your curiosities, but also brings in new frustrations – no matter how experienced you are in other fields, entering a new territory will often make you feel like a rookie. Expect to misunderstand timings, processes, materials and tools – and your abilities. See the power of accepting these frustrations: as a beginner, failure is often all you have – because it only serves as the starting line. Every skill you acquire will stay with you, and will work for you henceforth – and no skill was ever acquired without a person’s openness to failure. Accept the journey into the arts as a brainstorming process within which there can’t be any actual mistakes; since every mistake will help you grow, the only way to fail is not to try.
Withhold judgement: Accept that there are no quality standards in your art making, except the ones you define – and even these are subject to change (through time or modified aesthetic ideals). Accept that in the arts, there can be no tolerance for other people telling you about allegedly “correct” ways of using tools, materials or processes. Become an empty mind, a beginner’s mind; become accepting of whatever inspires, motivates and enriches you. Withhold judgment about what you do, until you really, really know what you’re doing.

I want to understand my own work. How do I go about it?

Understanding your work is an endless process of approximation. While objects might appear to be static or finalized, our minds keep changing their ideas and interpretations about it. Someone might mention an aspect that we previously were oblivious of; a new piece might add additional contextual layers to a body of work. Understanding your work requires you to have an open-ended discussion with it, and to continuously manifest, challenge and readjust your opinions. Consider the following strategies:

Investigate your work to understand the topics it touches. Compile a list that includes as many attributes as possible, at least going into the work’s aesthetics, semantics and process. Understanding the basic metrics can be a first step (is it time-based or not; what are its size, weight, duration, materials, edition size, resolution, stableness, etc), but also your emotional associations.
Understand this as brainstorming exercise where you can’t do anything wrong. All associations are welcome, even if they might not make sense yet: your subconscious might know more about you and your work than might be obvious.
- Aesthetics: What materials are used in which way (“Yarn is colored and attached to stone surfaces”).
- Semantics: What is the work’s content (“Unclear, but potentially related to nocturnal activities of insects and/or surveillance technologies”).
- Process: How does your process look like (“Yarn is burnt at night, with a heat-sensitive camera recording it”).
Research references that touch these topics. The list you compiled will serve as research reference: which artists or art works exist that touch your aesthetics, semantics or process? This research works better the more you know about art history (including contemporary and emerging art) – but even if you don’t know too much yet, the process of researching will naturally increase your knowledge.
You might find works that touch your aesthetics, but happen in a different medium: can this teach you a new angle about your own work? What texts (books, magazines), videos, podcasts or movies exist about your topics? You want to go ever deeper into the rabbit hole of your work, to enclose yourself within the world you created. You want to become an expert of your work.
Understand (rationally and/or emotionally) which topics to deepen further. The idea of this research is to find previously undiscovered, potential paths. You’ll never be able to pursue them all, but that’s not the point: rather, the goal is to deepen your understanding of your work.

Note that you don’t need to do these steps on your own, but can also discuss them with others. If you feel uncomfortable showing your work, you can investigate your work on your own, to only then start a discussion with someone else – based on your description. This lets you keep your work under the hood, while approaching others with a list of reference topics (those compiled in step 1). Some will find it easier to ask “Which artists worked with yarn?”, “Which artists use fire?”, “Which artists used heat-sensitive cameras?” than to show their work – especially if it’s unfinished, or if you don’t yet know whether you trust your dialog partner’s judgements or sensitivities.

My work feels alien, raw and unstable. It makes me feel uneasy and worried. Should I still pursue it?

People love comfort zones. They offer low levels of stress and anxiety, and represent temporary safe havens. While being in constant comfort might sound perfect, it also includes the risks of boredom and stagnation; in the right amounts, anxiety can actually improve one’s performance. Since art strives towards the unknown and unestablished, artists need to find realistic ways to be exploratory and productive.

In the best case, exposure to unknowns would let you thrive: your courage would increase, and your life would become larger and less vulnerable. Reality is often different: departing from established routes can make you feel alien. That’s weird, since pursuing individual standards is an essential human trait: how to dress, what music to listen to, how to dance or talk or think – how to live and be. Yet humans also want to belong and feel embedded. The conflict between one’s individuality and social attachments requires self-empathy, and knowledge about one’s deepest hopes and fears: do you feel loved and appreciated? Why not? What are the sources of your worries? The challenge is to balance one’s individuality (one’s need for personal expression) with one’s needs for external appreciation (one’s need for belonging). This topic touches deeply: it represents another aspect of your lifelong quest to find a place in the world, and to understand what it might mean to be ourselves.

What aesthetics you pursue (“Yes, I really wanted to install the work like this!”) and enjoy (“Yes, I loved that movie, even though you didn’t!”), what tools you use and how you use them, which materials and semantics you focus: the more you pursue standard, established processes, the more aligned you might be with public tastes. The more you deviate, the less you might be understood by the general public; yet the more appreciation you might receive from society’s avant-garde. Even though today’s world is more diverse than ever before, there are endless unwritten rules on what’s right and what’s wrong, and what codes to follow – differing by individuals and sub-group. You might realize that your way of being isn’t compatible with the people whose attention you crave. In addition, creating work that feels deviant and new to you, doesn’t imply it feels like that to your surroundings: instead, it might say more about your lacking knowledge of art history and pop culture, which can feel diminishing on yet another level. The only way to get through this is to stay radically open-minded towards knowledge transfer, and to breathe in all of society’s past, current and future offerings.

Yes, you want to pursue exactly what makes you feel uneasy. To an art practice’s curious apprentice (a status we should never abandon), there can’t be stupid questions, and nothing can be alien or unstable enough. It’s mostly ego or fear that hold you back, that let you refrain from experiments. Yet feeling uneasy is predominantly a sign of needing further information about your work and what it could be, if you only followed through with it for some more weeks or months. Maybe you’re lacking knowledge about how to position it for others. Maybe you’re overworked and don’t see what’s right in front of you.

Imagine a process that would never feel alien, wouldn’t ever feel raw or unstable; a process that would always feel easy and worry-free: while this might sound magical to someone who’s stressed and anxious, it would represent the one thing that artists usually can’t afford long-term: stagnation.